Gaius Plinius Secundus

Pliny the Elder (circa AD 23-79)

Gaius Plinius Secundus was a famous Roman scientific
encyclopedist and historian.
He surveyed all the known sciences of his day, astronomy, meteorology,
geography, mineralogy, zoology, and botany.
Most of his works are lost, but his book Historia naturalis (Natural
History) still exists.
No single work of Pliny still exists, but many of them were copied, complete or
in excerpts, multiple times.
So today numerous copies of many of his works exist, which gives some security
that they are authentic.

Plinius was born in Como, studied in Rome and then became soldier, which was a
typical career for a Roman aristocrat.
He became a cavalry commander in Gallia (France) and Germania (Germany) and a
friend of Vespasian.
During the reign of Nero he was in foreign countries,
which kept him out of harm's way.
After Nero died, his friend
Vespasian was made emperor in AD 69.
So he returned to Rome and took up various public offices.

He finished Historia naturalis probably in AD 77, and he states that he
has covered 20,000 subjects of importance drawn from 100 selected writers, to
whose observations he has added many of his own.
To Plinius the world consisted of four elements: earth, air,
fire, and water.
This world view persisted for 1,500 years, and some people still believe it.
It was a basis of the alchemy of the Middle Ages.
He postulated the earliest theory of gravity, light substances were prevented
from rising by the weight of the heavy ones, and vice versa.
He made a model of the solar system, the Earth surrounded by seven stars, the
Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.
Since the Moon obscured the Sun during an eclipse he thought it was larger than
the Earth.
But the sciences which interested him most were botany, agriculture, and
horticulture.
And although many of he theories later proofed to be wrong, his work is of an
imense value.
He invented important basics of science and influenced generations of
scientists.

He died as a scientist in AD 79 during the eruption of the volcano Vesuvius.
He was in command of a fleet in the bay of Naples.
There are two versions of his dead.
The heroic one thells he was going to take a closer look, and then was killed by
poisonous fumes.
The other sais, that he died because of a heart attac, caused by
arteriosclerosis and fastened by his asthma and the stress and strenuousness if
the rescue operation.

To his honor this typus of eruption of Mt. Vesuvio, which injects lots of ash
into the air and sends ash flows down the slope of the volcano, is today called
plinian eruption.
Its typical sign is a cloud going straight up into the sky and then, when
reaching a layer of the same dense, is blown horizontally by the wind.
The result is a sort of L shaped cloud.